Sunday, February 26, 2012 | 8:00 pm
Olin Hall | Bard College
Free and open to the public

For the first time ever, Contemporaneous presents an evening of entirely never-before-heard music! Six brilliant, young composers from all over the globe bring radically different and exciting musical voices to new new works that they have written specifically for Contemporaneous, and Just for Us will feature the world premiere of all six of these new works! Experience the unknown, the electricity of possibility, as these new pieces of music are brought into the world for the first time!

Dubio, by Mexico City native Andrés Martínez de Velasco, is a visceral and passionate work for violin and chamber orchestra. Written for violinist Leonardo Pineda, the lushly virtuosic solo violin takes the audience on a dramatic journey, where it seems that any sweep of the bow might just carry you away.

Juilliard undergraduate Molly Joyce's Dollhouse is a ruminative stream of memories. Whirring and twinkling through bustling rhythms and rich harmonies, colliding spirits from the past meld together into something unique and quintessentially of the moment.

Representing the American Midwest, Lawton Hall's new Hypothetical Patterns of Public-Private Conflict is a musical response to the deep divide between the creation of art and the viability of being an artist in a society of mass-production and "goal-driven careerism." It makes its statement not through futile political means, but by boldly taking the audience along through un-diluted inner explorations and self-expression of the composer.

Pianist and composer Maxwell McKee's new work for us explores a fresh, luminescent soundscape, sweeping the audience from an expansive and poigniant opening to an effervescent groove and a boisterous climax over the course of its two compact movements: Lament and Rebirth of Wonder.

Reels, Adam Zuckerman's new sextet, emerges, evolves, and erupts from a single tone into a commanding and turbulent opening phrase that dissolves into itself as quickly as it came. It takes the remainder of the piece to unpack this stirring gesture and all of its sonic and dramatic possibilities.

Contemporaneous founding co-artistic director Dylan Mattingly's A Way A Lone A Last A Loved A Long the Riverrun is road music, a voyage through the American vernacular, an ode to the field recordings of Alan and John Lomax, to Big Bill Broonzy and the first traditions of new music in the US, and which twirls and flies in every direction in this riotous conclusion.

Program:

Andrés Martínez de Velasco (b. 1991): Dubio (2012)
Molly Joyce (b. 1992): Dollhouse (2011)
Lawton Hall (b. 1987): Hypothetical Patterns of Public-Private Conflict (2011)
Maxwell McKee (b. 1991): Double Quintet with Percussion (2012)

— Intermission —

Adam Zuckerman (b. 1992): Reels (2012)
Dylan Mattingly (b. 1991): A Way A Lone A Last A Loved A Long the Riverrun (2010)

* All works world premieres commissioned by Contemporaneous